A weevil in deep focus

This article was taken from the March 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online. "It's only on the microscale that you see how beautiful a boring brown bug can be," says Laurie Knight. To get this close to a weevil, the Kent-based photographer used focus stacking: with an Olympus E-330 mounted on a microscope stand, he took 160 photos of the iinsect at 8x magnification, shifting the focus distance 10 microns -- a hundredth of a millimetre -- each time. The images are combined using Zerene, a software program, creating one entirely focused portrait. The image came tenth in the 2010 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imagine Competition, but success has a price: insects were harmed in the making of this photo (they are killed by freezing). In his defence, Knight, 41, says he traps his tiny subjects by hand, "So they've got a chance."

This article was first published in the March 2011 issue of WIRED magazine